January 17, 2024February 7, 2024 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Holiday Engineering: What Not to Do

We can learn a lot from Chanukah, because Chanukah is a garbage-tier holiday.

I mean this in a mostly-detached, mostly-analytic way. Like many people who were raised Jewish, I have some very fond and happy memories of Chanukah. Anything can accrue fond and happy memories, if you have a way of getting people to do it. But Chanukah is full of features that actively detract from its being resonant, impressive, memorable, or fun. It is an anti-advertisement for its community.

If you’re a would-be designer-of-holidays, this is actually a really useful thing. Mimicking the good and successful holidays is quite hard; their quality tends to hinge on a lot of idiosyncratic hard-to-replicate factors, and “invent something as cool and punchy as the $WHATEVER” can be a tall order. But it’s easy to look at a design failure and say, “I”m not going to do that.”

With that, let’s go into the details:

Keep reading

{{below the cut:}}

CHANUKAH: THE GOOD

Timing. It’s a midwinter festival-of-lights. Solid start. Everyone loves those. Brightness and festival cheer, in the long cold winter nights, is practically a need for many. The holiday mostly skates by just on being the winter light festival for the Jews. A+. Or, really, we should knock that down to an A, because Chanukah usually comes too early to be ideal for this purpose, but – still, quite good.

Traditional food (side dishes).Latkes are incredibly popular, and for excellent reason. If you’re trying to settle on a food that everyone will love, “fried potatoes” is a damn good choice.

CHANUKAH: THE NEUTRAL

Symbols. There’s really just one that matters: the chanukiyah (nine-branched menorah). Which is, on paper, a very cool and snappy symbol. Distinctive silhouette, ritual engagement, plus the allure of fire. But it loses a lot of points for the fact that you don’t actually light the whole damn thing, and get the proper visual effect, until the very end of a long-ass holiday when everyone’s enthusiasm and attention have ebbed. On the first night, in particular, you light just two candles in your chanukiyah, and it looks lopsided and sad.

Traditional food (sweets). Jelly donuts are fine, I guess, if uninspiring and uninspired. Chanukah gelt is pretty lame as candy goes…but from a holiday-design perspective, it’s hard to go too far wrong with giving kids candy.

Music. “Maoz Tzur” is kinda pretty. “Oy Chanukah!” is kinda fun. That’s pretty much it, barring some silly kids’ music (and I guess that Adam Sandler thing). Nothing that will knock anyone’s socks off. But, honestly, two decent songs is more than many good holidays have.

Gifts.Being the big annual gifting holiday is a double-edged sword. It’s some super-powerful mojo, culturally speaking. People are obsessed with giving and receiving gifts, in a way that’s very hard to excise or evade, no matter how often you trot out your utilitarian language about deadweight loss. Chanukah gets a lot of its traction out of the fact that it’s the holiday where you get presents. But. (a) In the modern world, the gifting holiday is unavoidably a locus of stress and misery for many people, and Chanukah doesn’t have nearly enough upside serving to support that burden. (b) Chanukah is bad at being a gifting holiday. The gifting is not well-integrated into the event, it’s a tacked-on thing copied over from Christmas, and it shows. There’s no real ritual surrounding it, no presents-under-the-Christmas-tree equivalent, certainly no Santa Claus. Worse yet, the eight-day-holiday thing means that either you need a set of gifts whose awesomeness is equally divisible by eight (mega-awkward), or else you have inconsistencies and disappointments.

CHANUKAH: THE BAD

Theme. What is the holiday about, when everything is said and done? What is our key takeaway message from all the shit we’re doing. “God is great, God looks out for His people, God performs mighty miracles.” Stop. Shut up. You fail. That’s every holiday, if you’re operating within a religious tradition. You need something more than that, something powerful and deep and important and special, to be even halfway-decent as a holiday. But for the vast majority of Jews (including Jews in the most orthodox and observant denominations), that’s pretty much all you get. Because…

Mythology. The story of Chanukah, the holiday’s narrative raison d’etre, is just unconscionably bad. In some extremely vague sense, it’s a story about Jews overthrowing foreign oppressors and casting off foreign influences…which is already pretty bad from a modern liberal perspective, we don’t like jingoistic ethnonationalism these days. But the actual events of the Chanukah story are less about Jews-against-foreigners than they are about Jews-against-other-Jews. It is a story about fanatics seizing power and murdering cosmopolitans. Virtually everyone hates that shit, up to and including the most tribal-minded Jews. The rabbis of the Talmud were pretty iffy about Chanukah for exactly this reason, and didn’t talk about it much, with the result that the holiday doesn’t have much in the way of supporting cultural infrastructure. And you really can’t tell the Chanukah myth without that horrible stuff; it’s so baked-in that it gets incorporated into even the most sanitized propagandistic Hebrew-school versions of the tale (with exactly the effects that you’d expect on Hebrew school students). The miracle of the oil feels like a tacked-on narrative coda, because it is, because without it the only possible moral of the story would be “kill your neighbor if he’s not pious enough for you.” But it’s much too little, much too late. The miracle of the oil is super lame by miracle standards: no one is saved from danger, there are no memorable SFX, the whole thing is relevant only to the rituals of a long-vanished Temple.

[There are several lessons that can be learned from this particular problem, at multiple levels of abstraction.]

Structure. You can have a good eight-day holiday, but a festival of that length needs an arc. The days need to be distinct from each other. You need to be either building up to a climax, or – more commonly, as with Passover and [the twelve days of] Christmas – coming down from a main celebration at the beginning in a long pleasant haze of semi-special time. Chanukah is flat and internally undifferentiated, except for the addition of more candles to the chanukiyah. You can’t sustain real holiday feeling that long, and there’s no particular day on which you’re supposed to do anything special, so it all just turns into a mush of “how much do we care right this moment?”

Activities. The traditional dreidel game is the worst, most boring, most unbalanced game in the history of games. Pushing it on children only makes those children hate Chanukah, and Judaism, and games, and you.

Traditional food (entrees). There’s no classic Chanukah dish that can serve as a viable main course, unless you’re one of those people who can happily eat fried potatoes as an entire meal. This is a glaring omission. It’s particularly bad for Chanukah, because Chanukah has so little else going for it that it really needs to lean hard on the standard holiday “gather for a festive meal” thing.

Social role. As many people will eagerly tell you, Chanukah was a pretty minor holiday for most of Jewish history; it got big largely because of a marketing push in the 19th and 20th centuries, mostly because people got scared about the prospect of the younger generations assimilating, and wanted to give them a holiday to compete with Christmas. Which is maybe the worst idea that anyone has ever had. For more reasons that I can easily list here, modern Western Christmas is an absolute SSS-tier holiday, one of the very best of all time. Setting yourself up as a direct competitor to Christmas – inviting your own people to make that comparison – is tantamount to telling them that your traditions and your community are worthless and weak, and that they should join the ranks of the gentiles. And that would be true even if your own offering were something halfway decent. Trying to do it with Chanukah…it’s like Estonia declaring war on the US. It’s the ultimate “we have food at home.” It is, if you’ll pardon my saying so, Christian rock.

Tags:

#this is an anti-Maccabee blog #(also latkes are weirdly bad) #(you’re right that it *should* be hard to fuck up fried potatoes) #(and yet) #Judaism #Hanukkah #meta #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #discourse cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

January 16, 2024February 7, 2024 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

what-even-is-thiss:

airborneranger63:

One time my rabbi told us, “imagine you had a box with a little bit of god in it. What would you do with the box?”

So we were like ?? “We’d protect it and keep it nice and clean and polished” and he was like “your body’s that box. Stop eating markers”

Every time I come across this post the last sentence smacks me in the face

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Judaism #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #poison cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

April 11, 2023April 13, 2023 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

attackfish:

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can’t argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

Tags:

#Passover #frogs #Untitled Goose Game #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #death tw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

April 10, 2023April 13, 2023 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

confused-goy:

When my cat lays down in loaf position, is she leavened or unleavened? Is my cat kosher for Passover?

ikchen:

My experience tells me that catloaves do not wish to rise, which makes them unleavened and kosher.

ikchen:

The above-mentioned loaf:

pipmer:

@coloredink

persian-slipper:

@animatedamerican

animatedamerican:

If your cat is not made from one of the five grains, she cannot technically be leavened. However, since it is clear that she can be made into something that resembles bread, it may be worth asking your local rabbi if she is kitteniot.

lannamichaels:

If your cat is made from the five grains, be careful about getting the cat wet, it could be purrbrochts.

Tags:

#*kitteniot* oh my god #Passover #puns #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #cats #food

October 3, 2022October 12, 2022 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

robustcornhusk:

so the apple cake we made a few days ago is, supposedly, an old family recipe: we just asked partner’s mother, who said “it’s my mother’s recipe, and before her, my grandmother’s – it’s an old eastern european jewish recipe”.

… it’s almost identical to this recipe – partner’s version has more orange juice, and drops the vanilla, and the whole thing has been scaled up a little.

i’m just charmed by the way everyone thinks it’s a family recipe, and in the end, everyone got it from a magazine or a neighbor (who in turn got it from a magazine).

And the recipe, it didn’t come from her mother or her mother’s mother (“My mother? Bake a cake? Ha!” my mother said.) but a clipping that a neighbor gave her from some now-defunct magazine.

My grandmother makes a very similar cake in a bundt pan. I liked to make up stories that it was from her mother’s mother and filled with mystery and mystique and then she told me she got it out of a Home and Garden magazine only 20 or so years ago.

We have something in common! This exact recipe was considered a family heirloom. I remember adding it to my family tree history for a school assignment. My father made up stories about it – something about escaping Poland with it. And then one day my mother came clean, it was just a recipe my mom got at the tennis club from one of her friends. The horror!

I kept thinking, there’s no way this could be the same recipe as MY mom’s apple cake, right? WRONG. It’s exactly the same recipe.

No way! My grandmother and mother make the EXACT same apple cake, and have passed the tradition on to me. I am, incidentally, amused to report that our recipe comes not from the old world or even an old neighbor, but instead from a 1960s Catholic church community cookbook.

now, what partner and i suspect has happened is this: oodles of eastern european jews immigrated to the US between 1880-1925, and with them came, if not recipes for apple cake, then at least the memory thereof. distinct-by-family apple cake recipes abounded.

at some point, some genius put orange juice in their apple cake. this recipe has a lot going for it: all the measurements are nice round numbers: 1 cup oil, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, 4 eggs. there’s a secret ingredient (orange juice). it’s hard to overbake it. it tastes great even if you mess up the ingredients. you bake it in a bundt pan and it looks pretty nice without any kind of glazing, maybe in a little bit of a retro 50s coffeecake kinda way, but the flavor’s good enough it doesn’t need anything extra.

so yeah, this recipe outcompeted all the other sharlotkas and szarlotkas out there, and now it’s everyone’s family recipe.

the earliest written version of it that i could verify (conceivably – i don’t feel like getting my mitts on that book) is apparently some 80s church cookbook, which is, y’know, kinda funny:

The cake may have first been written down in a church cookbook from Smith Island, Maryland in 1981, alongside spectacularly non-kosher items like “crab loaf.” I suspect that the cake is “Jewish” in the same way that old recipes label anything stir-fried as “Chinese” or anything with corn as “Mexican,” except with the weird bonus that the cake actually is easy to bake in kosher households, and, I suppose, that my actually Jewish family adopted it as our own.

(eta: it’s a cookbook for and by a community, certainly, but it doesn’t seem to actually be a church cookbook. also eta: i’ve figured it out; it was printed in two cookbooks within a few years of each other, the earlier being “Favorite Recipes from Trinity Church”, 1981 Maryland. )

there’s some similar apple cake recipes pre-1980, like this 1973 Teddy’s Apple Cake, but that one’s missing the orange juice.

it’s a very, very, very good cake, by the way.

Tags:

#hmmmmm #holding the eggs constant (because the number of eggs here is simply double ours)‚ our cake has: #less apple (and the apples are sliced‚ *not* chopped) #((god that cake looks wrong‚ all *pebbly*)) #more sugar on the apples (but the same in the cake) #slightly more flour #more baking powder #(butter for the oil‚ but that’s a known variation) #no salt (and no‚ we don’t normally use salted butter) #much more orange juice (4x) #(no walnuts‚ but that’s a known variation) #baked in a loaf pan‚ not a tube pan #three layers of apple‚ not two #honestly I think it’s primarily that there are only so many ways to make a cake #though it’s very possible that this recipe is in the genetic lineage somewhere #food #history #amnesia cw #embarrassment squick #Judaism #tag rambles

literallymechanical asked:

February 18, 2022February 27, 2022 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

I just learned that about 10% of Aramaic incantation bowls, with the spiral text and little demons in the middle, are fake. Not modern forgeries, but contemporary scams where a mesopotamian potter would scribble something that looked vaguely like aramaic on a bowl and sell it to illiterate customers.

Imagine coming home for rosh hashanah and having to smile politely while grandma rebekkah tells you all about how she’s gotten really into incantation bowls, and then whips out the 5th century equivalent of a resin and glitter orgone crystal she bought on etsy.

(The paper is “Two Pseudo-Text Incantation Bowls from the University of Pikeville,” authored by Craig A. Evans and Scott Stripling. You can find a pdf on google.)

normal-horoscopes:

1) that’s amazing

2) Big Ea-Nasir energy

Tags:

#(I went and read the paper and that’s one of two main hypotheses) #(the other one is that they were writing in tongues) #history #Judaism

November 11, 2021November 13, 2021 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

transgenderer:

Concept: saying grace, but instead of thanking God, you thank industrial agriculture (or the millions of people who contributed to its development and maintenance, or perhaps the first person to take each step, the first planter, the first plower, etc)

binary-bluejay:

Saying thanks to Fritz Haber and caveating “This would be much more enthusiastic if you hadn’t been enthusiastically responsible for war crimes but you’ve so far still probably been a net good”

oscillatingheatpipe:

The Rationalist Seder version of the Dayenu song kinda does this:

Had we severed law from vengeance,

but not learned to bake and slice bread,

but not learned to bake and slice bread, Dayenu!

Had we learned to bake and slice bread,

but not mapped out all Earth’s surface,

but not mapped out all Earth’s surface, Lo Dayenu!

Had we mapped out all Earth’s surface,

but not crafted printing presses,

but not crafted printing presses, Dayenu!

Had we crafted printing presses,

but not named the rights of humans,

but not named the rights of humans, Lo Dayenu!

Etc.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pAoJfDMxvriivzcF2/rationalist-seder-dayenu-lo-dayenu

Tags:

#proud citizen of the Future #food #war cw? #Judaism #music #do not malign potato

February 25, 2021February 28, 2021 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

animatedamerican:

dialmformara:

agitatedtortoise:

animatedamerican:

so tonight I’m at synagogue, listening to the Purim Night reading of the Book of Esther, like you do

and near the end of this chapter my brain presents me with the following:

nooooo ooooone plots like Haman
calls the shots like Haman
plans a genocide by casting lots like Haman

(It only works with the Hebrew pronunciation of Haman, which, like Gaston, is accented on the second syllable.)

By the time we get home my brain has added:

for there’s none so well-favored and kingly
yes, we all can be certain of that
he’s so rich that his pockets are jingly
and he looks really sharp in a three-cornered hat

*face in hands*

Petition to sing this every year at Purim.

I shared this with my dad, and he added:

No one’s spruce as Haman,
Nor abstruse as Haman;
No one’s half as good tying a noose as Haman!
He’ll use gallows in all of his decorating!
No one else hangs as well as Haman!

niiiiice

@maryellencarter, here it is, and thanks for the reminder to reblog it this year.

Tags:

#Tumblr traditions #Purim #Judaism #death tw? #I still have never actually listened to the song this is parodying

January 11, 2021January 14, 2021 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

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e242148a52b097f6f212f4f26ecee303d7b62eba

itsbenedict:

learning a lot about aeronautics today

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Judaism #fun with loopholes #unreality cw?

September 24, 2020September 26, 2020 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

kuttithevangu:

i told my family about the rabbinic definition of a “wall” as “a barrier that impedes the passage of goats” and my mother was so delighted by this that weeks later she showed me a photo of a baby goat squeezing itself under a gate and was like “this is NOT a wall!”

gallusrostromegalus:

@creekfiend

radical-awe:

If the baby goat had to squeeze through, that may suffice? Impeding can mean slowing down or delaying or making more difficult, so if the gate posed enough of a challege, it may be a wall.

kuttithevangu:

A wall that does not stop goats is not a kosher wall but the rabbis, IMO, define it too narrowly, as they say a wall two handsbreadths off the ground will stop a goat and admittedly I have kind of big hands but I’ve seen goats get through a smaller space than that on many occasions

glumshoe:

My neighbor has a goat farm with a cattle grid instead of a gate on his driveway. It seems to contain them, to my surprise. Does a cattle grid count as a “barrier”, and if so, could a goat-stopping cattle grid be considered a wall?

kuttithevangu: